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Does anyone have a cheap aftermarket time machine for sale? A quick update on the state of the Books project: As is painfully obvious, despite my best intentions, the Books project has been in a state of intermittent hibernation over the past year or so. As regular visitors know, I decided to leave graduate school for a life as an entrepreneur late last year. As of earlier this month, I am no longer a member of the University and I am now working full-time on launching Audacious Software as a viable vehicle for making a living. Since January, Audacious Software has released a new version of the Shion home automation system and taken on a variety of paying consulting clients. Unfortunately, life as a new small business owner has kept me busier than expected (Readers/users: Launch your “I told you so” missiles, now!) and I’ve been unable to make any significant progress on the Books software (save for stumbling across the occasional smart intern here and there). For the foreseeable future, the Books project will be in hibernation mode until my situation stabilizes to a point where I can give Books the time and attention it deserves. I don’t know when this will be, so I don’t begrudge anyone jumping ship at this point and moving on to a competing bit of software. So that said, it’s extremely likely that this may be my last word on this project for some time. Given that this may be the case, I wanted to share a few thoughts that I had about Books before I go: 1. I want to thank everyone who has contributed to the project in one way or another. Books was the first app that I wrote that went anywhere and the feedback that I received from its users made it a much better project than I would have created alone. 2. Enrico Richter and his band of merry translators deserves a ton of credit for any success that Books enjoyed. Through his hard work, Books was made available and accessible to thousands of users around the world. 3. Since Books was my first app, many of the headaches present in the software are the result of my inexperience and learning. Books was a great canvas for trying out new ideas. Some worked, while some didn’t. 4. Between my experience thus far with Books and launching my first commercial application (Shion), there are a lot of things that I plan on doing differently for the next incarnation of Books. The computing landscape has changed significantly since I began to create Books, and my conception of the software never really changed with the times. 5. When Books does comes back (and I intend to bring it back in one form or other), it will be quite a bit different than its current incarnation. In my experience, electronic books and readers (like the Kindle) will change how books are read, and programs like Books need to anticipate and adapt to those changes. The next incarnation of Books will have much more in common with applications such as iTunes than it will with Bookpedia or Delicious Library. 6. I think that the vision embodied by Books 3 (and previous versions) had a good run, but is on an evolutionary dead-end. The next generation of Books needs to accommodate traditional printed materials, but it needs to be much more than a catalog. Intelligently articulating this “more” will be an interesting challenge. 7. I’m a bit disappointed that I wasn’t able to make Books into a sustainable open-source project. In an ideal world, I would not be writing this post as there would be a community to pick up the slack. However, any failings of Books as an open source project are mine alone. In many respects, I took on too much and while I managed to keep up with the programming (for a time), I failed put in the other work to build a community of developers around the software. 8. I highly recommend that users check out other alternatives to Books for their cataloging needs. While I’ve been dawdling, the competition has been doing some great work on improving the overall cataloging genre. 9. Despite the DRM and less attractive hardware (than the Sony), the Kindle is really fricking cool. I’m still debating which has been a more influential gadget for me: the Kindle or the iPhone. (It’s already surpassed the iPod for me.) Thanks for giving my work a try and helping me make it better. I really hope that when I come back to this project, it can be with something really interesting and cool for all of you. I wish the best of luck to all of you. Posted by Chris Karr on June 23rd, 2009 | 3 Comments » Last month, I had the good fortune to bring on Joey Lange as an intern at Audacious Software for two weeks. Joey is a Books user who was interested in Cocoa programming, so we figured that having him help out with Books’ anemic printing support would be a good idea.  Joey worked hard and produced the PrintingPress export plugin, pictured above. Instead of using a PDF-based backend (like I did with the PDF exporter), Joey decided to create a WebKit-based system that can be extended with new page templates. I think that he did a good job and am proud to share his work with the Books community. This software is available via the Plugin Manager, so give it a spin. Joey will be supporting this software, but please still post comments below and I’ll be sure to relay them to him. Posted by Chris Karr on June 23rd, 2009 | No Comments » Books Localization Status (Books 3.2.5b)
Last updated: April 16th, 2009 Posted by Enrico Richter on April 16th, 2009 | 1 Comment » A lot has happened since 2005 and many of the software packages targeted by Books have moved from XML-based storage engines to SQLite databases. Since it’s a bit misleading for Books to advertise that it can import Delicious Library and Booxter files from the most recent releases, I will be removing these plugins from Books in 3.2.5. I don’t have time to rewrite them to target the new data formats while I’m in the process of getting Books 4 off of the ground. If there’s an enterprising volunteer out there who wishes to tackle this problem, please get in touch with me. On a similar note, I’ll be retiring the Amazon Importer. Amazon’s API has changed since its introduction and the Python code that I relied upon has not kept up. Please note that the Quickfill plugins will continue to function. Thanks for your patience and understanding. Posted by Chris Karr on April 15th, 2009 | Comments Off Books 4 ePub goodies: QuickLook & Spotlight plugins While I’m hard at work maintaining Books 3, I’ve also begun work on the foundations of Books 4. To recap, in its fourth iteration, Books will cease to remain a single application, and will instead become a collection of tools that use the ePub format as the basis of cataloging, searching, and reading your books from your Mac. Since these files will be organized using the file system instead of lists and smart lists, Spotlight and Finder will take over the searching, sorting, and previewing roles from Books. To enable this, I’ve created Spotlight and QuickLook plugins for ePub content. The Spotlight plugin unpacks target ePub files and imports the Dublin Core metadata from the package’s metadata file. This effectively enables you for search for items by authors, publisher, and rights from the Spotlight or Smart Folder interfaces:
The plugin also unpacks the HTML content and indexes that as well. This allows you to search inside your files in addition to the metadata:
The QuickLook plugin extracts cover images when possible to create a more useful visual representation of the file:
These previews can be used in standard icon view:
You can also look at your volumes using CoverFlow view:
Moving forward, Finder and QuickLook will replace the current list and gallery views used in Books to browse collections. If you’re interested in giving these plugins a try, you may download them here. To install, copy The Spotlight plugin is compatible with 10.4 and higher, while the QuickLook plugin requires 10.5 or higher. New ePub files will be indexed and QuickLook’ed as they arrive on your system. In some of my own testing, I found that I needed to reset the Launch Services database to force the system to reindex the older files. If you discover that this is an issue, The X Lab has a good explanation about how to reset this database. These plugins represent an initial foray into ePub for me. If you discover that the plugins are not indexing all the appropriate metadata or not finding the right cover images, please post a comment below or send a note to books@aetherial.net with a description of the problem. I’ll follow up with you to diagnose and fix the issue. Posted by Chris Karr on April 15th, 2009 | 1 Comment » Books 3.2.5a is available for download. This beta release fixes a number of issues that have been reported to me since the last release. This is a beta release, so I’m not pushing it out on the appcast until I know that it’s working fine for all of you brave enough to test it. Let me know how it goes in the comments. Posted by Chris Karr on April 13th, 2009 | 1 Comment » Deprecating the Bookpedia Importer It’s come to my attention that the Bookpedia importer is no longer working with the more recent versions of Bookpedia. Given that this plugin was written more than three years ago, it’s no surprise that Bruji (provider of the Books iSight code) has moved on and adopted a more recent SQLite-based data format. Until I have some more time to reverse engineer the SQLite database and build an acceptable substitute, I’m deprecating the current Bookpedia plugin. This means that it’ll no longer be made available via the plugin manager, though it will remain hosted online for historical sake, if nothing else. Posted by Chris Karr on April 13th, 2009 | Comments Off For some personal reasons, the work on Books localizations fell dramatically behind. At the moment I am updating all present localizations - which includes: English, Danish, German, Spanish, Estonian, French, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Dutch, Brazilian Portuguese, Romanian, Polish, Finnish and Simplified Chinese. Changes to the localizations include some display bugs (especially when resizing some windows), bring newer functions to all languages and of course, improvements to translations. We are of course still searching for new translators. If you’re speaking one of the language that I didn’t mention in this post, feel free to mail me by using the form that can be found on the page http://books.aetherial.net/de/?page_id=61#contact and choose “Books Translation Management” in the pulldown menu. Posted by Enrico Richter on April 10th, 2009 | 1 Comment » Next steps for the Books project. I wanted to thank everyone again for the feedback on Books 3.2.4. However, now that the release is out, here are some plans for the Books project over the next couple of months: 1. I’m going to try to release updates to Books 3 once a month. There’s plenty to do and I can make time to keep the ball rolling now that I have some momentum again. 2. I’ll begin working on the Books 4 platform during that time as well. Given that ePub will be the new format for the platform, I plan on getting my toes wet writing some ePub QuickLook and Spotlight plugins that should be useful for anyone who has ePub files. 3. After I get the plugins out, I’ll begin working on two apps, one for creating Books ePub files and another for cataloging them on the system. I’m hoping to begin work on these in early May. In the meantime, please continue sending feedback and I’ll keep incorporating it into Books over the next couple of months. Now that I have regained some momentum, there shouldn’t be any excessive hiatuses for a while. Posted by Chris Karr on February 23rd, 2009 | 13 Comments » This update addresses problems introduced in the 3.2.3 release. A special thank you is due to everyone who sent in bug reports and was patience enough to help me find a variety of tricky bugs. Thank you! As always, post any comments or bug reports in the comments below or send an e-mail to books@aetherial.net. Posted by Chris Karr on February 22nd, 2009 | 3 Comments » |
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